Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

For the past five years, it’s been my pleasure to edit the You’re the Boss small-business blog, which has afforded me the opportunity to work with a talented array of journalists and business owners. The journalists covered their beats diligently, the owners shared their ups and downs generously, and we all benefited from the comments offered by an exceedingly smart group of readers.

Now I am leaving The Times, and this will be the blog’s final post.

As a parting gift, we offer some highlights from another year spent in the trenches, where we all continued to make mistakes and learn lessons: Read more…

Can bosses be friends with their employees? When I started my business at 22, I didn’t think about it. Since then, my opinion has been shaped and battered through 36 years of torture, disappointment, disbelief, inspiration, support and appreciation.

I now have 110 employees, many of whom have been with me for more than 15 years — with an average tenure of nine years. But do I consider them my friends? Sure, some. I would certainly say I am on friendly terms with all of them. Some owners call their employees their family. Is that better or worse than calling them friends? I guess it depends on how you feel about your family!

Until last week, I thought I had this all figured out. I had come to the conclusion that you can be friends with some of your employees — but not at the expense of being the boss. It has to be boss first, friend second. It is just like being a parent. Parent first, friend second. Read more…

Having chosen to continue with my current insurance provider, Independence Blue Cross, and also to continue offering multiple plans for my employees, my next step was to choose which of the company’s 38 plans to offer. Independence’s multiplan option, called “Blue Solutions” allows me to choose any five from a subset of 26 of the company’s 38 plans. Because I had a bad experience with the plan that most of my employees chose last year, a high-deductible bronze plan with low premiums, I wanted to take a look at all 26 plans again and compare their features.

Independence has a portion of its website devoted to its multiplan option. It has a lot of information, arranged in a way that I found difficult to process. There is no premium information at all. There is no one document that compares all of the plans. Instead, Independence provides PDF files comparing their plans within a single metal level.

These are difficult to read online, and when printed on ordinary paper, the text is so small that I couldn’t read it. In the end, I used our 24-inch printer to print very large blow-ups of these grids, and then spread them out on my conference table. The printouts entirely covered a table 15 feet by 5 feet — a huge mess, but at least I could walk around the table and see all of the details in one place. Read more…

When it comes to hiring, Silicon Valley has long been a bastion for white and Asian men. In fact, at several of the world’s most well-known tech companies, including Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook, women account for fewer than one in five tech jobs. Several of those companies have said they are serious about improving the gender makeup of their work forces and for good reason — research shows that companies with more diverse teams tend to perform better financially.

Jennifer Dulski, president and chief operating officer of Change.org, a start-up that provides free, online petition tools to facilitate social change, has made it a priority to recruit a diverse staff. Change.org has more than 80 million users (we wrote about the company last year), and this month it received $25 million in funding to expand. Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, the organization has more than 200 employees now and 51 percent are women. Its leadership team is 40 percent women, and they make up 27 percent of the engineering team.

(Change.org would not disclose its own racial diversity numbers. “We are still awaiting the results of a staff survey to collect ethnicity data,” Ms. Dulski said. “We are actively working to make sure we have representation among the various aspects of diversity that matter to our staff.”)

Ms. Dulski was a co-founder and chief executive of The Dealmap, a start-up that aggregated local discounts from hundreds of group buying sites. Google acquired Dealmap in 2011, and Ms. Dulski said that made her the first woman to sell a company to Google. She stayed there for 18 months as a senior executive before joining Change.org in January 2013. What follows is her advice for start-up founders who want to recruit more women.

Think about gender diversity early in your company’s formation.

It’s too late when you’re a thousand-people company to realize you’ve ignored diversity, so put it into your values early and send a clear signal to current and prospective employees that you care about it.

Anne Dowling is not running a high-growth start-up. She doesn’t live in a major metropolitan area. She’s not chasing investors or working 80 hours a week. She raises her 7-year-old son and often skis or hikes in the morning.

Ms. Dowling, a former competitive skier, is running a pair of lifestyle businesses: Ridge Street Wine, a wine shop in Breckenridge, Colo., and a related store, Breckenridge Cheese and Chocolate, selling wine by the glass and a variety of artisanal cheeses and chocolate. Together, the shops bring in $400,000 a year in revenue, enough to support her family — her husband, Kenny, works there, too — while providing the freedom to do things she wants to do.

Not that it’s easy. “Right now, I am stressed,” she said. “We have to pay rent.” Cash flow generally dips before her two big seasons — winter and summer — and uncooperative weather can keep tourists and local regulars away. “We have great snow this year,” she said, “so we’re off to a better start than usual.” Read more…

Are traditional health insurance brokers — the trusted, chatty advisers who are quick to show up at your door at the hint of a problem — becoming obsolete?

In a recent post, we reported that Zenefits, a software company and online brokerage firm that claims to have automated much of what brokers do, seems to have alarmed enough insurance agents that last month, the insurance commissioner in Utah banned Zenefits from serving as a broker in the state.

Meanwhile, embedded in the Affordable Care Act is the idea that health plans ought to be standardized enough that ordinary people can choose among them on their own. What, then, is left for a broker to do?

Not much, according to Parker Conrad, founder and chief executive of Zenefits, who says his clients lose nothing by signing up with his company.

“The only thing that you give up is that we will not come in person. No golf, no steak dinners,” Mr. Conrad said. “We’ll run an open enrollment meeting for your employees, but we’re going to do that over video. What you get on the other side is that everything moves online, so there’s no more paperwork, there’s no more faxing; it’s all done via the system. Employees can make changes themselves.”

Companies with at least 20 employees get a dedicated account manager at Zenefits; smaller businesses don’t. When it comes to finding a health plan, Zenefits will quote a price, instantly, for every plan available in the state. “A broker, it’s like work for them to go generate quotes,” Mr. Conrad said. “So probably, particularly if you’re a small company, they’re not going to go quote you everything. They’re going to go quote you five or six pretty standard options.”

In an article we’ve just published, we describe the experiences of a handful of business owners who are trying to determine if – and how – they should expand their social media platforms beyond Facebook and Twitter.

One of those owners is Andrew Royce Bauer, the 21-year-old chief executive of Royce Leather, a high-end leather goods manufacturer in Secaucus, N.J. After trying out Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat, Mr. Bauer decided to return his efforts to his more traditional standbys: LinkedIn and especially Facebook.

On Facebook, Mr. Bauer said he is using somewhat controversial techniques that he hopes will increase page “likes” and ultimately generate revenue. Please read the article and the conversation below and tell us whether you think Mr. Bauer’s social media plan will work.

Q.

You have more than 100,000 likes on your Facebook page, but a lot seem to be outside your target audience. Many are 18-to-24 years olds, and a lot are from Istanbul. How do you get them?

A.

Obviously, Facebook has fake users. And Mark Zuckerberg admitted that, and they’re trying to cut down. I’m not going to say they’re all real people. But they are all authentically obtained likes. We will have people in our business post in groups, “Like Royce Leather on Facebook.” And that’s generally what we do to gain as much traction as possible. If you look on our page under “Posts to Page,” that’s the best reflection of us. People writing on our page, telling us what they don’t like, what they do like. On Facebook, there’s no guarantee that the person’s real, but we’re going for real people. Only real people pay for the product.

Q.

Where are these groups you write to?

A.

For example, on LinkedIn there are groups for C.E.O.s, young professionals, factories. There are tons of groups on LinkedIn and Facebook where you can just post your page and say, “Check us out, check out what we do.” And it gives you a greater audience, these groups, 30,000 people, 60,000 people. So you gain a lot more traction. Maybe it’s a little bit spammy, but you want to get as many people as possible liking your page.

About

You're the Boss offers an insider's perspective on small-business ownership. It gives business owners a place where they can compare notes, ask questions, get advice, and learn from one another's mistakes. The blog also offers analysis of policy issues, and suggests investing tips.